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A reluctant secessionist and Confederate, Alfred Moore Waddell staunchly supported the Democratic Party during the late 1800s. Although he served as a Congressman throughout the 1870s and edited and owned influential newspapers, he is most known for his role in instigating the Wilmington Race Riot of 1898, a riot that he described as "perhaps the bloodiest race riot in North Carolina history."
Many North Carolinians influenced the course of the American Civil War, but none so uniquely as did James Iredell Waddell. One of the most successful Confederate commerce raiders, much like Raphael Semmes and John Taylor Wood, Waddell spent much of the conflict overseas and left a controversial legacy behind. In particular, he commanded the only Confederate ship to circumnavigate the globe and continued fighting U.S. boats after the war's end.
In the years before the American Revolution, settlers moved down the Valley of Virginia to arrive in the North Carolina backcountry, where neither Virginia nor North Carolina extended their authority. Undaunted, the settlements along the Watauga River negotiated a lease agreement with the Cherokee Nation, formed the first autonomous white government in the British colonies, and ultimately played a major role in the American Revolution.
Paragon of post-World-War II-era conservatism, Richard M. Weaver, son of North Carolina, was one of the most important American thinkers of the twentieth century. Although he lived outside of North Carolina for most of his life, Richard M. Weaver visited his family often (he even purchased a home in Weaverville), and never lost a sense of place.
North Carolina's diverse ethnic history includes the Welsh, who migrated from the middle colonies during the early eighteenth century to work in the naval stores industry. By the end of the century, the Welsh owned numerous properties and played a vital role in North Carolina society. More than a few modern-day North Carolinians are of Welsh descent.
The term Whig has had different uses throughout American history. During the American Revolution, patriots used it to symbolize their opposition to the tyrannies of the English crown. After the Revolution, the term fell into disuse, and some even used the term in a pejorative manner.
With a population of over 5,000, Whiteville is the largest town in Columbus County and serves as the county seat. Whiteville's beginnings date back to 1733, when it was originally part of a 640 acre tract inherited by attorney John Burgin and his wife, Margaret
A Monroe native and an African American leader who gained national fame for advocating “armed self-defense," Robert Franklin Williams inspired Black Panthers and other groups that criticized what they considered the ineffective, less-violent techniques of the Civil Rights Movement. During the 1960s, Williams went into exile and lived in Cuba and China, where he published newsletters and produced radio programs for dissemination in the United States.
A public and political action by Wilmington women, the Wilmington Tea Party occurred sometime between March 25 and April 5, 1774. It was one of the many tax protests that swept the American colonies after the Boston Tea Party of December 16, 1773.
Born on January 21, 1920 in Raleigh, North Carolina, John W. Winters, Sr. lived an accomplished life in the city where his “family home” had always been. Before he died on February 15, 2004, Winters started a construction company and real estate management business and became Raleigh’s first African American city councilman and one of the first African Americans elected to the North Carolina State Senate since the Reconstruction Era.
A planter and merchant from Charleston, South Carolina, who became an Anglican itinerant, Charles Woodmason, as one historian writes, spent his clerical career trying to stop the spread of evangelicalism in pre-Revolutionary Piedmont North Carolina.